Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “I knew Victoria Fisher,” he said. “She worked in my office.”

  I wasn’t certain whether he had forgotten that I knew this, or if there was more he was hinting at.

  “I know that,” I said.

  Cross turned and looked at me from under the hood of his sweatshirt. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “You have to understand the risk I’m taking, how you could be putting yourself, your career, at risk.”

  “You said on the phone that the tape wasn’t the entire story.”

  He nodded and waited for a jogger to pass before he continued. “What do you know about me?”

  “You were a cop, then a prosecutor, and now you’re working as an investigator for the DA.”

  “On the edge of oblivion,” he said. “Does that seem like an odd career path to you?”

  I nodded. “I did wonder.”

  “I was a rising star in the office. There was talk that I might be the next DA of Los Angeles. That’s a long way from Palmdale.”

  “And then a law clerk in your office was murdered by the River Killer.”

  “So goes the official account.”

  “What’s the unofficial?” I asked.

  “Two days before she died, Victoria Fisher was putting some court briefs together. Part of that day she spent in records. I think she found something that was a great threat to some very powerful people and she was killed for it, and it was made to look like the work of the River Killer.”

  “How do you know she found something?”

  “She told me about it the day of her death.”

  “What did she find?”

  Cross shook his head. “She was going to meet me the next day before work. She was killed that night.”

  “And you have no idea what it was she found?”

  “California is the fifth largest economy in the world, Los Angeles its center, City Hall the keeper of its secrets. I’ve come close. For eighteen years I’ve been looking, and every time I sensed the truth was near, I was pushed away, my career in shambles.”

  “You have any proof of this?”

  He shook his head. “Not a single document, no witnesses. Just the silence of a dead law student. Perfect in its conception.”

  “And difficult to believe,” I said.

  Cross looked at me and nodded. “When I was in uniform my patrol partner was Len Hazzard.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Why did Hazzard go on to become an elite detective in Robbery Homicide while I ended up chasing down bail skips and lizards in the high desert?”

  “There could be any number of reasons,” I said.

  “True enough.”

  “If this is as complete a conspiracy as you say, how do you know I’m not a part of it?” I said.

  “You’re not LAPD.”

  “There are other agencies you could talk to. Why trust me?”

  “Because someone in another agency isn’t the daughter of the only suspect ever questioned in the murder.”

  The intricate circles and intersecting orbits of Danny Fisher’s madness seemed for a moment like the simple lines of a road map, drawn with perfect clarity.

  “You know who I am?”

  “I was a good cop, an even better lawyer. We both want the same thing, Lieutenant. The truth.”

  “Do you know about Danny Fisher?”

  Cross pulled back the hood of his sweatshirt and nodded.

  “He’s been missing for four days,” I said.

  “He’s a mixed-up kid. It’s not the first time he’s run off; that could be about anything.”

  “Do you believe my father killed Victoria Fisher?” He shook his head. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Twenty yards offshore a pod of dolphins broke the surface with their dorsal fins, chasing a school of small fish that began leaping out of the water, trying to escape their attack. Cross watched them intently for a moment in silence.

  “They can leap into the air where they can’t breathe, or they can stay and be eaten. Not much of a choice.”

  I wondered if he was talking about the fish, or himself, or even my father. Cross pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back over his head and stood up.

  “Help me,” I said.

  Cross just stared out at the gray water. “I can’t even help myself, Lieutenant.”

  He started down toward the beach.

  “Danny Fisher told his grandmother that he was getting messages from someone about his mother’s death. He called that person his ‘dark angel,’” I said.

  Cross stopped and looked back at me.

  “Danny makes things up. Be smart, Lieutenant. Walk away from it, as fast as you can.”

  I turned at the sound of screeching tires and a blaring car horn on PCH. When I looked back, Cross was down on the beach, running south along the water, disappearing into the fog.

  21

  I replayed the conversation as best I could for Harrison, but it did little to settle my uneasiness. If I was to believe in Cross’s conspiracy theories, then I might as well accept as fact that Danny Fisher’s tormented map could also be just as real. And if I bought into that, then all my years as a cop meant nothing.

  But even if all the things Cross said were true, it still left three young women strangled to death along the river, my brother and a cop murdered, and my father the only possible connection to all of them.

  Was Hazzard a piece of the puzzle, as Cross had implied? Did that explain his presence at Lopez’s death? Or was he just a loyal officer taking part in a hunt for the killer of a fallen brother, even a misguided one?

  Whichever answer was closer to the truth, the message Chief Chavez received overnight from Hazzard requesting the return of all LAPD files in my possession did little to clarify it either way.

  As Harrison pulled off the 101 I could see a column of smoke rising in the distance from the fire that had passed through Hazzard’s neighborhood days before and was now slowly moving into the Santa Monica Mountains. A few police barricades still blocked off streets where houses had been lost. A row of destroyed palm trees stood like thirty-foot-tall black embers.

  The fire had moved through like a large hand spreading out over the landscape—a finger of flame stretching that way, another this way. Where one house was lost, the one right next to it stood intact.

  On Hazzard’s street a few trees and power lines had been singed, but no houses appeared to have been damaged. But the fire had left its mark, nonetheless. As the residents fled the flames, it was as if their fear had left a residue.

  Hazzard’s house, like the rest on the block, looked uninhabited. The hose he had fought the fire with was still stretched out across the lawn. The cedar fence around the side now looked like a row of burned matchsticks.

  We parked out front and started for the front door. Three feet away we could see that it was open; the picture window in the front had a series of cracks in it. Harrison touched my arm and I stopped.

  “Something’s not right here,” he said softly.

  I hesitated for a moment, then reached for the door.

  “What the hell have you done?”

  We spun around. Hazzard was standing behind us, his hands covered in soot and ash, his eyes red and wild with anger.

  “You talked to the boy, didn’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Danny Fisher. You talked to him. You filled his head with more madness.”

  “Danny Fisher’s been missing since the day my brother was killed.”

  Hazzard looked at me for a moment then stepped past us and into his house. We followed him down a hallway and into a small office. It had been ransacked, the desk in the corner nearly destroyed in the process.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  “Your brother wasn’t killed. It was a suicide,” Hazzard said. “Who else have you talked to?”

  “I talked to your ex-partner Cross. He doe
sn’t believe it was a suicide, either.”

  Hazzard closed his eyes and shook his head. “Do you have any idea how much damage you’ve caused?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about him, or Danny?”

  Hazzard took a breath. “If you’ve seen Danny’s room, you know he’s insane. And if you’ve met Cross, you’ll understand that the only reason he has any job at all is because of strings I’ve pulled. And for these good deeds, I’ve become part of their wild conspiracies.”

  “You’re protecting them?” I said.

  “I was.”

  “You think one of them did this?”

  Hazzard nodded. “There’s no one else.”

  “The night Victoria Fisher died, my father left the theater with an actress. Why isn’t that in your file?”

  “Because they never got farther than the parking lot.”

  He took another deep, exhausted breath. “Your father didn’t break in here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s been dead for years, Lieutenant. The transient whose body we found after the last murder was probably him but we couldn’t prove it.”

  “Why?”

  “He had been run over by a train, probably multiple times. The body wasn’t discovered for a week. He was buried as a John Doe because no identification could be made.”

  Hazzard’s words felt like a punch to the stomach, but I tried to push them away.

  “And you gave me the files because you wanted me to keep looking in the hope that I would lead you to Lopez.”

  Hazzard’s eyes narrowed and the muscles in his jaw flexed. “He was a cop killer.”

  “Armed with a can of beer.”

  The walls of the room began to close in. I imagined the sound of a train moving over a track, my father crushed under its wheels. I moved as quickly as I could down the narrow hallway until I was standing in the living room.

  “How can you be certain? For years you kept checking databases looking for matches with the River Killer.”

  “It was how I made sure he wasn’t alive.”

  I took a breath, my ribs aching again as if I’d just reinjured them.

  “That doesn’t change the facts of my brother’s death,” I said.

  Hazzard walked over to the front door and looked out at the scarred landscape.

  “At nine o’clock this morning the coroner certified the cause of your brother’s death as a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.”

  He turned and looked at me. “Let the past stayed buried, Lieutenant, before anyone else is hurt. And I want my files back.”

  We drove out of Hazzard’s neighborhood in silence until we reached the entrance to the 101.

  “I thought I would go through my entire life knowing little more about my father than what I saw on television.” But there was no putting the genie back in the bottle; alive or dead, he was becoming real to me.

  “Could we really be this off track?” I said.

  “Somebody took that surveillance tape, and they used the name Powell.”

  “And that leaves us right where we started.”

  I looked at the distant column of smoke from the fire in the Santa Monica Mountains. “I want to go home and see if I still have a house standing, and if I do I want to take a long hot bath.”

  Harrison looked at me and smiled. “I’ll help.”

  My cell phone rang and I answered. It was Traver.

  “You got a message from Dana Courson,” he said.

  “My brother’s girlfriend.”

  “Yeah. She said she’d meet you at her house at two o’clock.”

  I looked at my watch; we barely had time to get there.

  “Did she leave a number?”

  “No.”

  “Do we still have a unit watching her house?”

  Traver checked. “It was pulled after the call came in. They told her not to go near the house if an officer wasn’t present.”

  “Did she mention anything else?” I asked.

  Traver checked his notes. “Yeah. She said she knows who Powell is. Does that mean something?”

  I looked at Harrison. “It means the past isn’t as dead as it seems.”

  22

  It was ten after two when we stepped out onto the tree-lined street of ranch houses in North Hollywood where Courson lived. There was no car in the driveway. Half a dozen newspapers lay scattered on the porch where they had been thrown. A stack of catalogs and junk mail lay under the mail slot by the front door. I rang the doorbell but no one answered.

  “If she’s been here, she would have picked up the papers and the mail,” Harrison said.

  The curtains were drawn in the front of the house and, from what I could see, blinds shuttered the side windows. I checked the front door and it was locked, with no sign of forced entry. I looked back toward the street.

  “Maybe she’s come and gone,” Harrison added. “If they told her not to approach without a cop present.”

  “She called us. She wouldn’t leave,” I said.

  I stepped off the front porch and looked down the driveway to the back of the house.

  “The door to the garage isn’t closed,” I said.

  “She could have parked in the garage.”

  “Then why didn’t she answer the door?”

  We moved along the side of the house to the back. The gate to the backyard was ajar. A rectangular pool with a plastic cover stretched from the patio near the back entrance to a large bougainvillea and a banana tree that marked the property line. Harrison stepped over to the garage and pushed open the door. The air inside was at least a hundred degrees. A pungent aroma drifted out from inside.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Gas,” Harrison said, motioning to a mid-seventies yellow Volkswagen bug parked in the darkness. “That’s why you smell the gas. They always leak.”

  “It’s not just gas I’m smelling, there’s something else.” I flipped on the light switch but the light didn’t come on.

  “If she drove this, the engine would still be warm,” Harrison said.

  He walked over and placed his hand on the hood of the engine compartment.

  “It’s warm, but it could be just the heat of the garage. If it’s been driven at all, it’s not in the last few hours,” Harrison said.

  I stepped to the driver’s-side window and the air became even more pungent with a sickly sweet odor.

  “That’s not gas I’m smelling.”

  I looked inside but couldn’t make out anything in the darkness, and then I realized there was something moving.

  “There’s something in here,” I said.

  Harrison stepped over and had to cover his mouth with his hand.

  “The glass looks like it’s moving,” he said.

  I stared at it for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The inside of the window appeared to be moving, as if a current were flowing across the other side.

  “Flies,” I said. “The window’s covered in flies, hundreds of them.”

  “Thousands,” Harrison said.

  He looked at me, then reached into his pocket, removed a handkerchief, and handed it to me.

  “Cover your mouth,” he said.

  I put the handkerchief over my mouth as Harrison covered his with his tie. He looked at me and I nodded. “Go on.”

  He placed his hand inside his jacket pocket so he wouldn’t add any prints to the handle, then reached out and opened the door. The odor swept over us like an invisible wave, followed a moment later by hundreds of flies streaming out from the car’s interior. Harrison staggered back from the assault to his senses and I saw something on the seat fall toward us. I reached for Harrison as I heard the sound of tearing paper, and then the contents of a grocery bag spilled out onto the floor of the garage at our feet with a soft thud.

  “Rotting groceries,” Harrison said.

  Several flies hit the side of my face and I turned and rushed out the door into the air, gasping for breath.
My lungs struggled to be free of the odor of decaying food and I fought for breath as if I had just run a couple of miles. A fly caught in my hair buzzed next to my ear and I began shaking my hands through my hair, trying to get the last of them off me.

  “What the hell was that?” Harrison said.

  I turned and he was on one knee on the driveway spitting out a fly.

  “She didn’t leave those today,” he said. “They’ve been in there for days.”

  I tried to understand what we were looking at. “If she didn’t leave them, then what did she drive away in?”

  “A second car,” Harrison said.

  I shook my head. “Why drive away in one car and leave a load of groceries in the other?”

  “Panic,” Harrison said. “Her boyfriend had just been killed.”

  When I had seen Dana Courson last she was pointing a gun at me and nothing about her struck me as someone in the grip of panic. She was scared but in control.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  I began to catch my breath and then stepped through the open gate to the backyard. Leaves and soot from the brush fires covered the sheet of plastic over the pool. An unfinished bottle of water sat on a table under a cabana. The back door was open to the kitchen. A head of lettuce was visible on the floor.

  “There’s something wrong here,” I said.

  Harrison stepped into the yard and looked at the door. When he saw the lettuce on the floor he drew his weapon and held it at his side. We approached the door and took positions on either side of it, and then Harrison pushed it open and we stepped in. Another bag of groceries lay on the floor—vegetables, fruit, and spilled containers of ice cream. More flies darted around, but nothing like the inside of the car.

  A set of keys and a small shoulder bag sat on the blue Mexican tile of the countertop.

  “She was bringing groceries in and was surprised by something—maybe the phone call about your brother’s death,” Harrison said.

  I shook my head.

  “She said he called her from the hospital after the accident. In the morning she went to his apartment. She found out about his death there, from the coroner investigator Chow and Detective Williams.”

  Harrison stepped past the groceries into the dining room with his weapon raised.